If the practice is to be meaningful, it must engage language, body, history, memory, the present, the unconscious, imagination, ethics, and relation in a drive towards the future. None of these terms are self-evident because they are intertwined in complicated ways. I emphasize practice over product to counter the production-consumption relationship that has so violently become the focus of life under capitalism in the present moment. But even more emphasis should be laid on being (as opposing to doing or practicing), to acknowledge the flow of the Tao and my animal, vegetable, and earth relations. Being doesn’t have to be static; it can still move. To do implies deliberate action. To be includes what is thought and what is unthought. There are, however, historical contingencies that sometimes demand a temporary copping to other ways of being and working. These are interruptions that are paradoxically also part of the flow of practice, production, being, and doing. These may include, but are not limited to, the temporary embrace of linear narrative, institutional forms, the pretense of coherent subjectivity, the recognition of human/animal distinctions (for, say, the purposes of human rights). Contingency and contradiction are inescapable parts of the flow, as long as one lives in the present. It is necessary to live in the present in order to remain ethically engaged.
The future matters because it is always what is coming. The future contains the continuously unfolding outcome of creative action rippling out in infinite time and space. Creative action is itself infinite and incomplete. Its channels are human and nonhuman, galactic, planetary, tectonic, molecular, nanoscale, animal, vegetable, and mineral. Human agency matters but only in relation to other forces, which it can never control absolutely. To intervene — from what location, and into which flow? To invent — from what (kaleidoscoping) subject location? The “I/I” stutters, repeats, retreats, returns as “we” rushes by, never the same river twice, and over the falls in a barrel. Intervention could be a knife, a drug, a kiss, a punch, a cheque, a word, a letter, a breath, a smell, a taste, a bite, a kick, a lick, a stab, a bomb, a blast, a gas, a laugh, a crash, or the momentary appearance of a wolf at the edge of the forest. An invention could be a clock, a bomb, a machine, a language, a text that talks back, an algorithm, a phone, a stone, a process, a procedure, a patent, a gene, a cell, a particle accelerator, a protocol, a cake, a car, a drug, a response. Both invention and intervention want agency and agency wants them, but can’t sit around long enough to attend to consequences, outcomes or mutations. Are human animals agency addicts? Couldn’t we just bee?
Meaning matters in the human realm because we are communicating creatures. Meaning is the dyed-in-the-wool humanist part of the equation. It is through meaning that we know our effect on both human and nonhuman others. Meaning is always negotiated and always under construction, never complete. It is never possible to touch meaning in any absolute kind of way. Meaning is still worth the bother. It is how the knowing monkey knows itself.
Language structures the relationship between sense and nonsense. Language is both form and content. Humans are encultured in language. It structures the way we perceive reality. The truth is out there, but language can never touch it. Language keeps trying. It is one among many tools we have with which to touch one another. Humans are fools to privilege language, but that doesn’t seem to stop us. I love language even though it really fucks me up.
Body. You know, the skin you’re in. All the gooey stuff underneath it, especially: the blood pump, the junk filters, the central processing unit, the sexy bits. Also, the speed regulator, the electrical system, the sense centres. Touch, taste, sound, sight, smell. The parts that are made of language. The holes through which culture enters. The enhistoried parts. Gender, race, and class, for now.
History. The force that brings body into presence. The past, both as we know it and as we make it. History is a vibratory force. It moves from us deep into the earth, then rumbles up again, sometimes softly and sometimes louder and more insistent. Sometimes history means large events: the poisoning of Socrates, the execution of Galileo, the burning of the Library and Alexandria, the rise of reason, the ‘discovery’ of the Americas; the Riel Rebellion; the Opium War; the British 99-year lease of Hong Kong; the Indian Act; the U.S. Declaration of Independence; the splitting of the atom; the Cultural Revolution; women’s franchise; Chinese-Canadian franchise; the moon landing; the death of Salvador Allende in Chile; the Rape of Nanjing; the Tiananmen Square massacre; the American Wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq; Perestroika; the fall of the Berlin Wall; Japanese-Canadian redress for wartime injustice. Other times it is personal: Grandfather trying to bring his then-young family across the Chinese line in Japanese-occupied China during WWII, but stopping in Guangzhou and becoming a seller of dry provisions for the course of the war. The death of Hakka Great-Grandmother while Mom was alone in the house with her when Mom was thirteen. Histories are like waves. Waves interact and overlap to make the present. Benjamin’s angel flies backwards, observing the wreckage and weeping.
Memory. The imperfect, subjective dimension of history. Those aspects of the perceived past that I hold onto in order to know myself. Another way of talking about the body. My memories may or may not be real, but they make me “me.” Memory forgets about progress. Only the white man believes time is linear, and even he’s not sure. The past ruptures into the present all the time. Our ancestors remember us in their every waking moment.
The Present. A scatter pattern, produced by the interacting forces of history and memory. Unpredictable and unknowable. The present feels total, but it is not. The present is only one way that time can be compressed. It might return to us in another form at any moment.
The Unconscious. History buried in the body, stirred around in the stomach, passed through the liver and pumped through the heart. It bubbles up and shows us things we didn’t know we knew. One has to know how to read dreams, jokes, and other signs. It can come out as images, music, language, text. But also as hiccups, rashes, boils, headaches, spinal deformities, and cancers. And also: drunken rages, crying fits, wild parties, manic episodes, bouts of depression, and other behaviours currently deemed anti-social or worthy of medicalization. The unconscious is everything that rational humans push down in order to be rational. What we were in touch with when we knew we were animals, and will contact again.
Imagination. To exercise it is to collage, juxtapose, water, feed, juice, roast, simmer, taste, roll, destroy, or play in the present with the complicated interactions of body, history, memory, and unconscious. It can be exercised in multiple media — narrative, language, film, paint, bacteria, stewing pot, frying pan, political system, economic system. Any results are temporary. The imagination is a continuous and interacting force, like history and memory.
Ethics. Always more than a matter of being good. A complicated interaction of thought and action. Ethics are always contingent and always of the present. Ethical practice will necessarily vary from person to person, state to state, collective to collective. Ethics is a practice that comes with judgement, desire, hope, and action. Anyone who tells you there’s one right way to do things is not an ethical person.
Relation, as in no man is an island. As in “All my relations.” As in the flow of the Tao. Nothing and no one exists in isolation, and there are no actions by any individual that do not affect other individuals and entire systems. We are responsible for the rippling-out consequences of our actions, and how they reverberate back to us through the multiple practices of other beings in relation.
With much gratitude to a bunch of writers, critics, and philosophers — accidental, Occidental, Indigenous, Eastern, and ornamental, too numerous to name.